LESSON 3: Why a soul? — Deep Space Travel & Universe Economy

THIS DOCUMENT IS FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY
and explains things the way that the Truth Beauty and Goodness Commission currently comprehends them. All information contained herein is subject to change as clarifications and additional revelations may become available.

What is the soul?

The soul of mortal man is a living construct of morontia energy suitable to the need. It is mortal before it is fused with spirit (it can die of neglect through the absence of survival values), and only becomes immortal after fusion with a Spirit fragment during the morontia part of the ascension career. The INTRODUCTION to our curriculum The Soul in Man contains additional information about the soul.

How is the soul created?

The soul is first created, or initiated, by the indwelling Thought Adjuster as an energized and living (but embryonic, unborn, and nascent) morontia pattern, which at first is akin to an empty shell, much the same way the mind and brain of a newborn mortal is alive and functioning, but otherwise empty until new sensations and experiences start pouring in. 

The embryonic soul

The Urantia Book sometimes refers to the mortal soul as being embryonic in form. It is alive and functioning, but is not yet fully developped, it is nascent. It is akin to a foetus, a mortal life inside a womb, that is not yet grown into a fully functioning and independent person. The real birth of a fully formed soul occurs at the time of the resurrection where it can now begin to grow fully and autonomously as a full fledged Morontian working his/her way through the 570 levels of morontia life, culminating in achieving the level of a first stage Spirit on Salvington.

How is the soul maintained?

There are two aspects to maintaining a soul:

1. Maintaining the physical energy requirement which is largely supplied through the electrical and life circuits of the mortal biological heart (very little of this is understood by our current science). This is why the soul is so often associated with the biological heart, and why excitement of the soul can often be felt by the heart as a type of jubilant energy surge. 

2. Maintaining the morontia requirements of personal growth, and the spiritual requirements of life value, experienced through the mortal adventure and discovery of Truth Beauty and Goodness are sustenance for the soul. This sustenance is referred to as your — survival values.

What of our mortal memories?

Our mortal life memories are not stored in the soul. These memories become the eternal inheritance of the indwelling Thought Adjuster (TA), and if your TA returns to you in the resurrection then these mortal memories will also be restored to you once you awake from the transitional death sleep.

These mortal life memories are of two types:

1. Internal personal memories. These are the mortal memories that are personally perceived and stored in the memory section of the biological brain. The Thought Adjuster makes a spiritual and eternal copy of all these brain memories that have survival value*, and they become the TA’s eternal inheritance (whether we choose survival or not).

2. External memories, the things we do outwardly. These are recorded and preserved by our Guardian Seraphim. A crude comparison would be of someone video taping your entire life. These recordings become part of the Local Universe’s permanent public records and archives, which you can freely access after your resurrection.

   
   * This document doesn't discuss emotional memory. These are the memories stored outside the brain at the body's cellular level by people (usually young children) who have not yet received a Thought Adjuster and are therefore without a soul.

Why is the soul needed?

The Urantia Book tells us that physical matter cannot travel faster than the speed of light (and our science concurs), and that the resurrection halls of the Mansion Worlds are many light years away from Earth**, thereby making slower than lightspeed travel through the vastness of space, from Earth to the Mansion Worlds, within a normal mortal lifetime (average 70 yrs), all but impossible.

** No precise astronomical information is currently available, but current speculation ranges from 11 to 430 light years away from Earth.

This explains one of the fundamental reasons for the existence of souls. Souls are used as a means of converting our most personal survival values from a biological physical format/state that is too heavy and dense for faster-than-light deep space travel, to a very light and strong morontia format/state that can easily be enseraphimed for faster-than-light deep space travel. In this sense the morontia soul can be loosely compared to a small lightweight digital flash drive, onto which your most critical and essential computer files can be copied and later removed for easy transport to a distant location. The big heavy computer (which is hard to transport) equates to your mortal body, while the small and lightweight flash drive that can easily be carried anywhere equates to your soul.

To continue with this simple but useful analogy we could say that the mortal body of flesh and blood is like a computer, and the soul is like a portable flash drive.

1. When the mortal body is alive, it is like doing work directly with the computer.

2. Any important work that must be preserved in a distant location is also copied to the portable flash drive for safe keeping and easy transport at a later date.

3. Eventual physical death of the mortal body is like turning off the computer when the work is done.

4. Once the material body is dead, the Guardian Seraphim remove its soul for transport to the Resurrection Halls***. This is like removing the flash drive containing all the essential data (survival values) and transporting it somewhere else so it can be connected into another more powerful computer (an upgrade) at a distant location.

5. When the distant location is reached the flash drive is reconnected into a new computer. The new computer is then turned on and work continues exactly where it left off with all the critical data intact. Likewise when your soul reaches the Resurrection Halls it is reconnected to your new morontia body and you are restarted (awakened from the death sleep) and life continues where you left off with all your survival values intact, having been safely transported from Urantia to Mansonia 1 by your soul.

   
   *** Not all resurrections occur on Mansonia #1. There are various types of special resurrections that occur at the Constellation Headquarter in the special Resurrection Halls located there, and even at the Local Universe Headquarter of Salvington in certain special cases, both locations being much farther away. Details of these special resurrections are in the Urantia Book paper 43:1.5.

Universe economy requires maximum efficiency

Creation makes very extensive use of what we would consider technology, and technology that is far far beyond anything our mortal minds can comprehend. That includes systems that can do everything that soul technology can do and much much more. Nonetheless, such systems are not always economical when applied on the grandest of scales. To safely bring innumerable mortals, from across entire galaxies, through the portal of death, to be reconstituted by the process of resurrection into new morontia bodies on new heavenly planets, is indeed an endeavour on the grandest of scales! 

The concept and system of souls is specifically designed to meet the requirements of universe economy for this stupendous undertaking. Souls are designed and created to meet the "essential minimum" for the preservation and transport of all survival values of personalities, in accordance with adequate universe economy requirements.

Passing through the portal of mortal death is part of this essential minimum requirement of universe economy. Death is not always a pleasant means of beginning our cosmic voyage down the road greatly travelled. Death has always been, and by a very wide margin, mankind's greatest fear, and that is the fear of the unknown. Yet, a little bit of the right kind of knowledge can go a long way towards alleviating these troublesome fears.

It is the hope and goal of the Truth Beauty and Goodness Commission that these lessons which we provide on this subject matter will provide you, our students and readers, comfort, comprehension, peace of mind, and hope for the future that they have given us.

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